Can You Hear Me
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Have an agenda, and stick to it. Sticking to an agenda is a challenge for me, personally, because I get carried away with the topic, with listener questions, and so on, and cheerfully get lost in the weeds of communications debating some fine point with my interlocutors. To address this particular failing of mine, I’ve taken assigning someone else the job of timekeeper, with strict instructions to keep us all on track. The right to interrupt must be given, and given verbally, or else the hapless timekeeper will be polite and wait.
Have a buddy, or better yet, have two. You need a partner to help pick up the points that have been dropped—questions that get forgotten or points left unsaid—in the conversation.
And you need someone else to run the tech. I once participated in a webinar through one of those cheap-and-cheerful free online webinar companies, and the two of us running the call were also presenting. We had no one to help with the tech. So, of course, a few minutes in, a terrible howl of feedback developed. No one had any idea where it was coming from, but it sure made the webinar excruciating. With a tech person, we might have figured it out or suggested an alternative.
Never go more than ten minutes without some kind of break and change. Stop for a check-in, for questions, for everyone to howl at the moon—anything to break up the monotony.
Questions are particularly helpful. They’ll help you gauge how everyone is doing.
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Announce time points to your audience. Either you or your buddy should regularly comment on what the status of the meeting is. “Great, Nick. We’ve been going ten minutes, so it’s time for a break. We’ll take questions for five minutes, and then we have two more segments of twenty minutes each. Is everyone OK with that?” Imagine you’re doing color commentary for a ball game.
Second, strengthen the human
and digital connections
Put the emotions back in that the format takes out. This is the most important and toughest rule of the road for webinar devotees. If you insist on doing webinars, then you must figure out how to consciously restore emotion in these sessions. The simplest way is to begin to train yourself to add in emotional words that we normally leave out of conversation because how we feel is obvious from our body language. “I’m concerned,”
“I’m thrilled,” “That comment really upsets me because …” Tell your audience how you feel. If you don’t, how will they know?
Remember, your voice won’t signal your emotions accurately or much.
Set up ground rules for collaboration. Because people crave conversation and collaboration, make it easy for them to do both. Create some rules, announce them, and stick to them.
You might take questions every ten minutes. You should set up several channels—texting, emails, and so on—for people to use in the webinar chat room so that everyone’s questions can get answered. For my previous book, also published by Harvard, I was the speaker for a webinar that had six thousand listeners.
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174 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Once Harvard and I knew that the number was so big, we decided to take as many questions as we could, and then I asked everyone who still had questions to send me an email. After the webinar, I answered all these emails.
Keep the focus. Stick to one topic, and explore that. Don’t branch out to other things just because you’re interested in them.
If people ask unrelated questions, compliment the question and mention that because it lies outside the scope of the webinar, you’d be happy to answer it in an email. Share what you can beforehand to make the webinar as focused and as efficient as you can. It’s amazing how few companies do this effectively.
Set up a website. Include whatever material you think will help people prepare.
And follow up with something after the fact. Have a book, an ebook, or a pdf to give away. Make it appropriate for your audience.
Begin with a compelling story. There’s simply no substitute for good storytelling to engage people.
Be clear whether your meeting is about an exchange of information or decision making. There’s a trend among publicly traded companies to offer their annual meetings as virtual-only meetings. Virtual has the advantage of allowing more people to attend, especially those who have insufficient money or time to make the trip to corporate headquarters. But it also muddies the waters around matters like vote taking, approving the slate of directors, and sharing the company’s financial health and prospects. These kinds of meetings will no doubt eventually go away altogether, because the inferior, virtual version will appeal less and less and ultimately not seem worth the effort to anyone.
Appoint someone to be the recording secretary if there are issues to be decided. The recording role is less important if the Chapter_08.indd 174
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avowed purpose of the meeting is simply information sharing, but it still might be done. You need a recorder if the meeting is a decision-making one. A summary of whatever transpired should be published (online) for all the participants—and those unable to make the session—to access.
If there are follow-ups to do, note those too, and notify those affected, especially if, during the meeting, the speaker agrees to do something. This means of keeping track is important to maintain or enhance the integrity of the speaker and conveners of the webinar. Especially in public webinars, but in fact in all such meetings, promises made should be kept.
Limit the number of participants. For a decision-making meeting, the research suggests that five to seven is the optimal number of people to attend.2 Webinars are, of course, typically intended to accommodate many more people than that. Some organizations use webinars to generate income, charging for seats. In that case, their profit motive would suggest no upper limit to the participants, beyond any technical limitations.
Nonetheless, there is an advantage, too, in exclusivity and scarcity. As an alternative, I recommend limiting the number to Dunbar’s number, or somewhere around 150, which is, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the upper limit of human relationships that we can apparently sustain.3 This limit creates the impression that you’re joining a tribe, not a rabble, and the psychological benefits will redound not only to the participants but also to the conveners as well, since everyone will perceive that a human connection is at least possible.
Have an overarching story line to your webinar. You’ll be breaking up your content into chapters of ten minutes each, but don’t take these discrete chunks as license to connect a few ideas together loosely. You owe your audience a story arc.
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176 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Summarize at the end of each chapter and tease the next one.
Think Dan Brown. Tell the audience members what they’ve learned and intrigue them with the possibilities of what’s coming next.
Vary the content and form of those chapters. Keep the variety coming. You might do one section as a Q and A, another as an interview, a third as a rant, and so on. Don’t make every chapter what all too many entire webinars consist of: a middle-aged male voice talking tonelessly about how to revolutionize your sales force.
In general, keep things a little more formal than a face-to-face meeting. In person, informality can be charming, because we can see and feel that the speaker knows what he or she is talking about. Over the phone, informality is baffling and off-putting.
Third, get the whole group involved
You might say, for example, “We are going to stop every ten minutes and call out each locale to give you a chance to ask questions.” You decide the format, but do provide some means for group involvement.
Then, keep track of those who don’t participate, and give them a chance to do so on the penultimate break. Don’t take this action on the last b
reak, because people tend to remember the last thing they hear, and you don’t want to make nonparticipa-tion the most memorable thing about your webinar. But do call out—or offer the opportunity, depending on the meeting and its ground rules—to nonparticipants so that they can respond.
Do go over the ground rules at the beginning. You can also publish the rules on the site associated with the webinar, but you have no guarantee that anyone will read them, so it’s essential Chapter_08.indd 176
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to go over the rules as you begin. The rules should include guidelines on mute buttons, questions, and timing.
Before you get to the meat of the presentation, go over expectations. You might mention the purpose and point of the occasion, the goals, or the context that you think is appropriate.
Don’t forget to announce who is on the call. You can do this in whatever way tact recommends, but remember that the sweetest sound of all, as Dale Carnegie was fond of saying, is the sound of someone saying your name.
And regularly use active listening to restate questions for clarity and agreement. “So what I hear you saying is X. Is that correct?” Get agreement before continuing.
Also, summarize regularly. As noted above, you might do so at the end of each ten-minute segment or even more often. At the end, you’ll want to give a further summation, suggest the next steps if there are any, and thank the participants.
Fourth, use the media and the
technology available to you
If it’s a public conference, then encourage the use of Twitter and other social media channels. Provide the necessary hashtags and other information so that everyone will comment in the same channel and stream and you can monitor the flow. A recent study at the University of Leicester found that speakers at a med-ical conference were monitoring their Twitter feeds in real time and reacting to the comments they saw on that channel.4 The result was mixed; some of the tweets were negative and highly distracting for the speakers. These findings underscore my earlier recommendation for a buddy to help with this sort of running commentary.
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178 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Just like face-to-face conferences, webinars should have backup speakers ready. If the show must indeed go on, then you need to be prepared should the scheduled speaker be unable to speak for one reason or another. The backup speaker is rarely called on, but is essential nonetheless.
And back up everything else. Technology is more and more reliable but still can fall apart when you would least like it to.
Have two of everything ready to go.
And finally, consider adding music to your webinar. Think of this as a form of sonic branding and an opportunity for inducing emotional responses. Because music is a shortcut to an emotional experience, it is a very good way to restore the emotion that a benighted technology has removed.
David Meerman Scott, a successful speaker and the author of the perennial best seller The New Rules of Marketing and PR, currently on its sixth edition, has launched a company to provide speakers and webinar leaders with signature music that they can own and use to create musical connections to their webinars.
He calls it sonic branding, and the company is called Signature Tones. The result could significantly add emotion and interest back into the format, which so notoriously lacks these qualities.5
Take some further tips from a webinar pro Roger Courville knows that most people hate webinars.6 He has been in the business of studying and improving the form since 1999, and he has seen the technology change over the years. “What I discovered,” he says, “was that it wasn’t about technology per se. It was about communication.” Courville soon came to believe that there was a real value proposition behind webinars—that, while they couldn’t replace an in-person presentation, they had some value above and beyond Chapter_08.indd 178
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a phone call. “There was a very real way to help people connect and communicate,” Courville says. The question was, what exactly was different about this new form of communication?
After all, as Courville points out, “the medium through which we communicate always transforms the experience.”
Courville believes that the way people approach new technologies like webinars colors the way they use those technologies.
“We tend to evaluate new situations based on old information,”
Courville says. “It’s part of why people resist change so significantly.” When it comes to webinars, people tend to notice what they lose compared with an in-person presentation, rather than focusing on the unique strengths of the format, Courville says.
Unfortunately, the way most people approach webinars does make this format a pale imitation of in-person presentation, Courville says. “The default is that [the webinars] keep the worst parts of the in-person presentation” and lose the best parts, he says. Most people don’t bother to push past that first impression of what’s possible in a webinar and discover the medium’s unique strengths. “There are things you can do better in virtual presentations, but often people stop before they get to that discovery,” Courville says.
Beware the Uncle Joe problem
Courville calls it “the Uncle Joe problem.” Imagine you want to learn how to play golf. You know that Uncle Joe plays golf, so you go out with him to try to learn. Only Uncle Joe is terrible at golf; you just don’t know enough to know it. “The vast majority of people now have attended webinars,” Courville says, “which means that they’ve attended bad ones.” This modeling of bad habits often starts with webinar companies themselves. They use webinars for marketing and lead generation. They use a simple Chapter_08.indd 179
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180 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels format, talking over PowerPoint slides for forty-five minutes and then taking questions. As a result, far too many people think that this format is the only way to do webinars, Courville says.
“If you open up Microsoft Word, do you think there is only one way to write?” he says. “And yet we do webinars, and we think there’s only one way to present or communicate.”
Perhaps because so many webinars are so dull, the trends in how audiences receive them are not encouraging for presenters.
The ratio of registrants to actual attendees is getting worse, Courville says. It’s now common for a hundred people to sign up for a webinar and only thirty or forty to show up. Why?
Most webinars aren’t very interactive, and people have figured out that it’s more efficient to play the recording back later, so they can rewind and fast-forward and absorb the information at their own pace. “If you are purely consuming information, consuming it in an on-demand format is a more effective way,”
Courville says.
Asking people to show up at a specific time and spend an hour with you is asking a lot of your audience, Courville notes.
“If your webinar is the same psychosocial experience as watching a YouTube video, and it would actually be easier for your audience to watch a YouTube video, you are charging too much,”
he says. You’re asking more of your audience than you’re giving back, he explains.
Understand the true meaning of a webinar So, what’s the answer? Courville believes that the quest for better webinars starts with realizing what a webinar really is. “If you’re using a real-time medium, take advantage of things that are uniquely real time,” Courville says. “Plan to connect and communicate with your audience.”
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Courville lays out a simple framework for how to approach a webinar to take full advantage of what the medium offers: analyze, map, and discover. First, he says, “analyze what you do in person.” When you do an in-person presentation, how do you like to be introduced? Do you use handouts? How do
you handle formal and informal audience interactions? Don’t just think about the main body of the presentation; take the whole experience into account.
Too many webinars are built on the assumption that the audience will sit passively and absorb the content for an hour or even longer. “Are there are any other contexts where you would sit passively and watch content for two or three hours?” Courville asks. “Yes, it’s called The Lord of the Rings.”
Assuming you’re not movie producer Peter Jackson and your webinar isn’t as engaging as a Hollywood blockbuster, it’s probably best to try to build in some interactivity. If you don’t, you’re not taking full advantage of this real-time communication tool.
The second step in Courville’s planning process is to map the different types of interactions to the tools offered in your webinar software. “Some things are going to translate,”
Courville says. “Some things are not going to translate. Some things can be adapted, and you find a different way to achieve the same objective.”
If you like to interact with your audience a lot in person, look for ways to interact online. For example, a good presenter listens to the audience—and most webinar software now includes tools that allow you to virtually listen and check in on how your audience is doing. Many platforms now offer attention meters that will tell you how many people have clicked into another window. You can also ask questions or take a poll to check that people are understanding your material.
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182 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Always be responding
A good webinar presenter should respond to questions throughout a presentation, Courville says. Audience members can type in questions through most webinar software. Responding right away will show that you want to connect with them, not just give them a data dump. Most software also now allows presenters to create breakout groups. With the click of a button, you can organize the audience into smaller groups, with each group placed into a video chat. This capability is a great way to break up a longer webinar and help the audience master your material.